The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European art-film eroticism and that were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.

Young performers will probably never equal or surpass the genuine shocks delivered by the young Madonna, as when she sensually rolled around in a lacy wedding dress and thumped her chest with the mic while singing “Like a Virgin” at the first MTV awards show in 1984. Her influence was massive and profound, on a global scale.

But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.

Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture Establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

Great minds think alike, as the kids say on the Interwebs, and that last paragraph sounds awfully familiar. As I wrote last Wednesday, linking to Paglia’s recent interview in Salon:

Pop culture, whether in the form of the original modernists, or pop music, in the form of rock and roll in the 1950s and early Beatle-era 1960s, only really produces anything interesting and new when it has a more conservative and traditional overculture to push against. The original modernists had a millenia of tradition to rebel against — or reject outright — in the late 19th and early 20th century. At least until another group of leftists, led by their own wannabe artist, were even more eager to “Start From Zero” in Germany’s post-Weimar era. (Philip Johnson, who founded the Museum of Modern Art’s architectural department really hedged his bets, by maintaining a concentration camp in both groups.)

Similarly, MTV was the perfect platform for Madonna to mount (OK, pun slightly intended) to release her early videos, to blow off (sorry) 30 years of the network Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters. Once that was gone — and particularly, once Madonna released her Mapplethorpe-inspired “Sex” book in 1992, where else could the culture go?

In a 2008 retrospective of the late Pauline Kael, the influential New Yorker film critic, who championed the violent, transgressive product of the “New Hollywood” of the late 1960s and pre-Star Wars 1970s, beginning with 1967′s Bonnie & Clyde, Robert Fulford of Canada’sNational Post wrote:

Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it.”

She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond “good taste,” moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?

Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. “Violence is its meaning.”

She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.

When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and ’80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: “Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline.”

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film’s worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. “It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples?”

Where indeed? But nobody who was standing behind the Panavision movie cameras of the ’60s and ’70s, or the television minicams of the 1980s was asking that question; they were too busy kicking over the applecart. Unfortunately though, “you can only be avant-garde for so long before you become ‘garde,’” as former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts once warned her fellow leftists. Similarly, a century ago, when bohemian French modernists coined the phrase, “Épater la bourgeoisie!”, evidently, they never stopped to consider that the bourgeoisie would eventually long grow inured at efforts to shock them.

Cyrus' "performance" was nothing more than a screaming attempt to be relevant and to be noticed. She is marginally talanted, at best, just like Britney Spears. The massive production screens the lack of real musical talant. With few exceptions, most current pop music will not stand the test of time. It is repetetive and boring. This is especially true of Rap "Music". In almost all cases they set up a very simple rhythm and cover it with unintelligible infantile rhyming vocals. Most of the vocals are spoken so fast that they sound like the car commercial disclaimers on the radio. The chorus is repeated over and over again until you just want to switch it off. At the risk of sounding like the Old Fart that I am, I long for the days when we had music with real lyrics, rhythm and melody. It took real talent to make music between the 50's and 80's, not so much any more.

In my early 20s I saw Bonnie and Clyde, which was a must-see event among the people I knew. As a visual artist I was captivated by the credits, which announced that the film that followed would be an authentic recreation of the period instead of the usual reinterpretation of period style wrapped in a familiar and current guise. Up until then only the Brits successfully made films in which earlier 20th century periods were done accurately. In this regard the film was brilliant, a feast of gorgeous production design. But I was very troubled by the film all the same. To me it was a glorification of nihilism for nihilism's sake and, to my knowledge, the first American film in which two killers were portrayed in a very sympathetic light. They were just two glamorous romantic kids larking about, sewing some wild oats. The violent ending was choreographed so lovingly, so like a ballet, that I almost expected the corpses to get up and take an elaborate bow. I sensed that the film signaled a significant cultural change that I found disturbing. I think I was right. This film marked the beginning of a new cultural era, call it The New Dark Ages, that has seeped its way into every aspect of our society.

From inconsequential Disney starlet to primitive, perverted, pornographic,sexual exhibitionist. Miley Cyrus is at the root core of our culture'sdepravity and obsession with sex......degrading us just a liitle bit further bypushing all the "twerking" buttons. Surely, next time on T.V., she willno doubt have to outdo herself with full frontal nudity and newer, more exciting objects in her hands.Can't wait......can you?

About those old time stars Madonna imitated in the beginning of her career: there tended to be an element of pride, of haughtiness, in their performances even when they played the sluts. Think of somebody like Marlene Dietrich - even when she was the bought woman she always gave the impression that she was doing it because she had to, not because she liked it. That you could buy her body or her time, but you could never buy her, and she'd get out of it the second she was able to. And that the hero would have to offer her something much, much more if we wanted to have her for real, not just get the illusion of having her.

That is definitely missing with most of the women who sell with sex today. Most of them just appear very cheap, women anybody could have for nothing, or for the price of a drink. Something one might use and then throw away when it breaks or he gets tired of it, with no regrets. Not many Bugattis in that bunch.

Paglia merely defends an ever coarsening, decadent, death spiral, neo-Pagan culture using the better diction and fancier vocabulary of the Academy but, nonetheless, it’s still just a defense of decadent, barbaric scheisse.

What is kind of funny: anybody remember her father's song where the singer compares a girl he met to a used cheap sporty car - looks kind of flashy, and nice, on the outside, but once you look under the hood there is nothing much there?

Seems like she matured into that. A cheap car which has been made up to imitate a sports car, but only a bit and only on the outside. What people who dream about a Bugatti Veyron while knowing they will never, ever be able to buy one may go for, and perhaps even keep for a while, and have slightly amused memories about if they mature past that stage and finally buy something more sensible, although when they talk about it it's more in a joking manner, how weak the engine turned out to be, or how the exhaust pipe fell off in the middle of a highway.

While it evokes amused pity, at most, even from those people who can afford just a Mercedes, and isn't really even noticed by those who can afford that Bugatti, except maybe when gets on their way.

Before you get all worked up about what Miley's performance says about our degraded cultural values, keep in mind that NOBODY LIKED IT. Everyone thought it was stupid, embarrassing, ridiculous, or raunchy in a very un-sexy way. Miley herself may have problems, but the universally negative reaction actually says something good about the culture.